1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to fuel-cell-based cogeneration systems, and more particularly, to a fuel-cell-based cogeneration system with radio frequency identification sensors wherein the RFID technology is applied to the fuel-cell-based cogeneration system.
2. Description of Related Art
With the recent economic development, demand for electricity is increasingly growing, and power shortage happens frequently in peak hours. Although power brownouts have been conducted as an expedient, this approach brings serious inconvenience to the people's livelihood and industries. Other approaches to improving power shortage include building new power plants and enhancing energy efficiency. However, the increasing environmental consciousness and the limited natural resources make building new power plants an unwise choice. Therefore, the most feasible way nowadays to remedy power shortage seems being enhancing energy efficiency.
Fuel-cell-based cogeneration systems have been introduced as a part of green industry. Such a system is composed of a fuel cell and a combined heat and power system, wherein the combined heat and power system retrieves the waste heat generated by the operating fuel cell and stores the same in the form of hot water in an isolating device, so as to provide electricity and hot water simultaneously, thereby reusing and leveraging energy.
However, for operating the fuel cell, it is necessary to introduce water with constant flow rate and constant temperature so as to bring out the waste heat. Thus, the water routes in the system have to be equipped with sensors for flow and temperature, so as to monitor and adjust the system timely, and in turn ensure the stable operation of the overall system.
Conventionally, for fitting the sensors to the configuration and layout of the system, the shielding wires of the sensors are likely to be bent, and this may cause measuring errors of the sensors. Moreover, the impedance of sensors is subject to the lengths of the shielding wires, so the shielding wires may not be trimmed without problem. If one tries to extend the shielding wires with compensating wires, the impedance can consequently become larger and significantly affect the measuring accuracy. Therefore, the length of the shielding wires is not flexible. In addition, the system is to be packaged in a confined housing and this also adds difficulty in wiring.
To sum up, since the accuracy of the sensors highly depends on the numerous sensor wires that cannot be bent, trimmed or extended, in the mass production of a fuel-cell-based cogeneration system, there is no choice but manual wiring. This not only increases labor costs, but also hinders the system from putting into modulization.